Spirituality

A more prescriptive work is George Kinder's Seven Stages of Money Maturity: Understanding the Spirit and Value of Money in Your Life. While I confess that I am put off by Kinder's system of "stages," including "Knowledge I" and "Knowledge II," I think this book is a useful challenge to much of what is said in congregations about "spirituality"—for Kinder, the test of everything is not in the correctness of the thinking but the rightness of the action that proceeds from it.

While it is not explicitly religious, Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin can help those who suspect they may be caught in a cycle of get-and-spend that eclipses their commitment to truer centers of loyalty. This highly practical guide (and the other books, seminars, and tape recordings that go with it) shows how to scale down your rate of spending so that you can achieve financial independence—the freedom to spend your "life energy" as you feel called to spend it.

Congregation members interested in pursuing such radical alternatives to American middle-class values will probably get farther doing it in groups than as individuals. For evangelicals a useful resource for this is John and Sylvia Ronsvalle's At Ease: Discussing Money and Values in Small Groups. While At Ease will discomfort readers who dislike road maps with a predetermined destination ("The Cross of Gold and the Cross of Christ"), it contains useful scripture citations and a good guide to running a small group discussion.

A wider range of Christians will be able to use the discussion guide from Ministry of Money, a group that "encourages all persons to become free from their attachment to cultural values regarding money and to live out joyfully God's call for their lives and resources." A guide, Ministry of Money: Exploring Money and Spirituality by Jan Sullivan Dockter, can be ordered from the Ministry of Money Web site (www.ministryofmoney.org).

A resource for Jews interested in exploring themes related to money, ethics, and social justice is Lawrence Bush and Jeffrey Detko's Jews, Money, and Social Responsibility: Developing a "Torah of Money" for Contemporary Life, which covers such seemingly diverse topics as shopping, investing, philanthropy, and social justice advocacy. The idea of a "Torah of money" has been picked up by Rabbi Shawn Zevit of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation (JRF) in his curriculum by that name, which is available at present only to those involved in JRF training but no doubt will take new forms in the future.